Working to make government work better

Sensible security | Cabinet Office technology
The answer isn’t to compromise security in order to meet the user needs. The answer is to think about security as part of the user needs, something that is integral to (and should be balanced against) every other facet of the service.

Five Whitehall lessons that Sir Humphrey never learnt – FT.com
The first thing I learnt was that there is no such thing as HM Government. Westminster is a ship without a bridge; there is no captain who can observe everything and steer a course. There are only the departments – 20 or so disparate organisations, peopled by stubbornly uncommunicative officials, each with its own direction of travel and prone to colliding with the others.

Everyone is doing strategy right now. – disambiguity
You are already doing strategy today. Don’t waste time trying to come up with the perfect strategy. Take time to understand the strategies that are in play today, make those as visible and addressable as you can, and start iterating.

Everything is Distributed – O’Reilly Radar
There are no complex software systems without people. Any discussion of distributed systems and managing complexity ultimately must acknowledge the roles people play in the systems we design and run. Humans are an integral part of the complex systems we create, and we are largely responsible for both their variability and their resilience (or lack thereof).

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data [pdf]
Economists suffer from physics envy over their inability to neatly model human behavior. An informal, incomplete grammar of the English language runs over 1,700 pages. Perhaps when it comes to natural language processing and related fields, we’re doomed to complex theories that will never have the elegance of physics equations. But
if that’s so, we should stop acting as if our goal is to author extremely elegant theories, and instead embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data

Don’t Force Google to ‘Forget’ – NYTimes.com
Data is data. Google and company have not internalized just how significant that first page of search results has become to someone whose name has been queried. What they place on that page may do more than anything else in the world to define a stranger in others’ estimations.